Like conventional magnetic nano-particles (MNPs), e.g. gadolinium- or magnetite-based, MENPs have a non-zero magnetic moment and therefore their spatial position can be remotely controlled via application of a magnetic field gradient. However, unlike MNPs, MENPs have another property, energy-efficient control of the intrinsic electric fields of MENPs by an external magnetic field. This unique capability is a result of the intrinsic magneto-electric (ME) coupling (due to the correlated magnetostrictive and piezoelectric effects) in this new class of nanostructures even at body temperature. As a result, when introduced in a biological microenvironment MENPs act as local magnetic-to-electric-field nano-converters. Consequently, MENPs are capable of distinguishing cancer cells from healthy cells by locally probing the cell membranes' electric properties, making use of the difference between the (electroporation) electrical potentials of cancer cells and healthy cells. It is known that a cancer cell's membrane porosity can be significantly increased (to allow particle and/or drug penetration through the cell membrane into cytosol) by application of a relatively high electric field (of the order of 1000 V/cm), but it takes a substantially higher field (by a factor of three or more) to achieve the same drug-penetrability effect into the healthy cells (Binggeli et al., 1980). This effect is widely known as electroporation (Cahill et al., 2010). The problem with the conventional macroscopic electroporation effect in treating cancer is the need to apply relatively high electric fields (>1000 V/cm) over a relatively large region of the body; as a result, the treatment requires relatively high energies and is accompanied with side effects because of significant energy dissipation, which in turn makes its use highly limited. Prior art in (Guduru et al 2013) effectively creates a remote-magnetic-field-controlled electroporation effect in the vicinity of the MENPs only and therefore can enable highly selective electroporation of cancer cells at a small fraction of energy with no destructive energy dissipation when an external magnetic field of a certain range of strength is applied.
Prior art (Guduru et al. 2013) used drug-coated MENPs to carry drugs inside cancer cells to kill the cancer cells. These represent a significant advance, however, drugs are still used, which can have side effects. There is no prior art that provides mechanism for cancer cell targeting and killing mechanisms using the methods or apparatus described in this application.